Gatsby Quotes

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Here is a collection of some significant quotes in The Great Gatsby. Feel free to add any quotes you find that you think are significant in the novel...


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Nick Carraway
 Gatsby
 "Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men"
6
Nick Carraway
 to Gatsby
 "They're a rotten crowd....You're worth the whole damn bunch put together"
162
 This quote depicts Nick's final view of Gatsby before his tragic death. Through all the ups and downs of there short friendship, he finally realizes that Gatsby only wanted good things.
Nick Carraway
 himself
 "Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known"
64
 This quote shows how Nick is not perfect. In the beginning of the book, he explains that he feels that judging people is wrong; though Nick is kind of "full of himself" and a hypocrite by saying this.
Nick Carraway
 Gatsby's idealization of Daisy
 "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion"
 101
 Gatsby thought about Daisy so much, he had created a perfect version of her in his own mind. It was impossible for her to live up to his memory of her.
Nick Carraway
 Tom Buchanan
 "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind..."
131
Nick Carraway
 the Buchanans
 "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made"
188
 Explains how the rich were hallow, and were not actually good people since they had money. When ever something went wrong, they could and would use money to cover up there mistakes.
Nick Carraway
 on resilience
 "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"
 189
 The idea of the "grail quest". Spending our lives trying to find a certain part of life; in the book this being the American Dream.
Nick Carraway
 telling Jordan she is a careless driver
 - “You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”
- “I am careful.”
- “No, you’re not.”
- “Well, other people are,” she said lightly.
- “What’s that got to do with it?”
- “They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
- “Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”
- “I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”
end of ch. 3
 This quote shows how Nick is not perfect. In the beginning of the book, he explains that he feels that judging people is wrong; though Nick is kind of "full of himself" and a hypocrite by saying this.
Nick Carraway
 discussing how Jordan was incurably dishonest
 "When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind."
end of ch. 3
Nick Carraway
 describing his first sight of Gatsby on the dock
 "I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness."
 20
 the green light represents Daisy; the American Dream; Hope
Nick Carraway
 Tom relishing the past
 "...but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game."
 6
 Tom is searching for youth and is driven by his past.
Nick Carraway
 Gatsby
 "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther..... And one fine morning- "
 180
 Represents the quest for the American Dream. Here, Nick states that it is unattainable, but humans try to reach it anyway.
Nick Carraway
 Gatsby
 "He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy."
 110
 Represents Gatsby's obsession of somehow reliving the past
Nick Carraway
 Gatsby
 "Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder."
 111
 This quote explains how Gatsby was great. As he spent time with Daisy, he realized he had to choose between living a brilliant and successful life, or having Daisy. Unlike most of the rich, Gatsby chose Daisy and began his "grail quest"
Nick Carraway
 deficiency of Westerners
 "I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."
 end of ch. 9
Daisy Buchanan
 her newborn girl
 "All right...I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool"
21
 Daisy wants the baby to end up like her- a foolish, pretty girl, because she believes what society has taught her: women should be beautiful, not intelligent.
Gatsby
 Nick's claim that he can't repeat the past
 "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can"
116
Gatsby
 Daisy
 "Her voice is full of money"
 120
Tom Buchanan
 Gatsby
 "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out..."
130
 Tom is commenting on the break down of families as a result of decaying morals in society. This is ironic because Tom is cheating on Daisy with Myrtle Wilson.
Tom Buchanan

 Nick
 "Now don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are.
 7
 This quote is a great depiction of Tom's low, selfish personality.
Myrtle Wilson
"...All I kept thinking was you can't live forever, you can't live forever." She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial laughter"
36
 Artificial laughter: Myrtle is fake and attempts to fit in with Tom and the "old money" people. She tries to take on the role of Daisy.
It is ironic that Myrtle says "you can't live forever" because she ends up dying.
Jordan Baker
 to Nick
 "You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”
 end of ch. 9




East
"... the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe - so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. ..."


Pg.4


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"... It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York - and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. ..."



Pg.5


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"... consoling proximity of millionaires - all for eighty dollars a month. Across the courtesy bay the
white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to ..."



Pg.6

Nick / Gatsby
 - Gatsby/ Nick
 "... `You will if you stay in the East' `Oh, I'll stay in the East, don't you worry,' he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as ..."


Pg.9


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"... The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You can't stop
going with an old friend on account of rumours, and on the other hand I had no ..."



Pg.15






East & the West
"... preserved a digni- fied homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside - East Egg condescending to West ..."



Pg.29


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"... the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan's
party, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his ..."






Pg.34


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"... hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him. From East Egg, then,
came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor ..."





Pg.39


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"... Beaver, whose hair, they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all. Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. ..."



Pg.40



West
"... When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o'clock and the whole corner ..."


Pg.4






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"... because he is physically removed from the places where his crimes take place. He drives into Manhattan; he telephones Chicago. West Egg itself is a kind of glittering retreat, umbilically linked by phone wire and road to the sites of the actual ..."




Pg.7


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"... She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented `place' that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village - appalled by its raw vigour that ..."



Pg.69


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"... - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. ..."




Pg.6


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"... until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. `How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a ..."




Pg.4


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"... I lived at West Egg, the - well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre ..."


Pg.5



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"... We hadn't reached West Egg Village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-coloured suit. ..."




Pg.41


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"... Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it ..."




Pg.67






The American
Dream
"... the rising middle classes. He takes leisure seriously because it represents a monumental theme:
the diminution and eventual corruption of American idealism ('the Ameri- can Dream'). ..."




Pg.8





America
"... Carraway wants to produce money out of the thin air of financial dealing. America itself is produced out of the dreams
of the first discoverers. ..."




Pg.12






Orange
"... often depend on such notation: `There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two
hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb' (p. z6). The ..."





Pg.2


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"... Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York - every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back ..."



Pg.26


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Colors
"... heap mounted higher - shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple- green
and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to ..."




Pg.9